In the case of Klinghoffer, as in the case of Cruising, the bottom lines for me are simple. I am concerned about some of the rhetoric and tactics of some gay radicals, but I am a lot more concerned about homophobia.

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Odds are, you'll hear about straight, gender-conforming women who are or have been abused by straight, gender-conforming men. Those stories are important, but they leave queer survivors and our abusers invisible just as we are the rest of the year.

My reactions to the HBO film of The Normal Heart are not much different from my reactions to the play. At what point do we begin to question the great and powerful Larry Kramer on his saying of TNH: "this is our history"?

Face facts, Truvada will be in everyone's bloodstream in about 15 minutes, so why argue over it? On two fronts we can assault this virus -- the POZ and the NEG, the dirty and the clean. Can we cut the crap and get in one line?

It took over 20 years for Larry Kramer to finally see his gut-punching AIDS play The Normal Heart put to film, but only days for the movie's few critics to slam its lack of racial and gender diversity. In what is now becoming a familiar pattern, filmmakers are being told to diversify our history, even if that history was less than diverse.

The Normal Heart remembers moments, then reinvents others, and it reminds me that AIDS fiction is not the truth but a reflection on the emotional truth of an epidemic. That's all I ask for. Lie to me about the look of a lesion and I will forgive you. Lie to me about the emotional truth of the epidemic and I'll pitch you out like an old AZT bottle.

History shows us that critics--outliers, whistleblowers, radicals of various kinds -- are usually the first to be silenced, so we should never be complicit in the work of silencing those with whom we disagree.

It's ironic to hear lefties lambaste Colorado's new "right-to-try" law as something that emerged from the corporation-coddling right wing. They apparently missed some of the most important lessons of the 33-year-old AIDS epidemic.

Anti-gay laws are sweeping across Africa, from Nigeria to Uganda. On Friday, as part of a Global Day of Action, hundreds of LGBT Africans and their allies protested in New York, encouraging Americans to get involved.

It was 1989, and I'd just told a former boyfriend that I was taking a break from my fundraising consulting practice to become the development director at Chicago House, a residential program for people living with AIDS. He was right: Nothing ruined the evening like telling a guy where I worked.

The government regulatory bodies were insisting on such a slow testing process that they were effectively condemning to death anybody who was diagnosed with HIV. As far as the authorities were concerned, the message was, "Go die quietly." They clearly hadn't met Larry Kramer.

The major new opportunity that has arisen recently has been encapsulated in the term "treatment as prevention." Powerful new evidence has emerged that antiretrovirals not only can preserve the lives and the health of people with HIV but can significantly reduce the odds of new transmissions.

What Larry Kramer, inspired so profoundly by Hannah Arendt, demonstrated is that the importance of our voices -- of speaking our minds and our truths, of organizing, of acting up and out -- can mean the difference between life and death. Which brings us to the situation in Russia.

Americans believe medical research is important for reducing healthcare costs and feel the current spending on biomedical research is insufficient. The message is clear, yet America's voices are not being heard in the budget deficit reduction debate.

On Dec. 19, 2012, the CDC released a report, "Estimated HIV Incidence in the United States, 2007-2010." To gay readers who'd lived through the AIDS epidemic, the document presented a landscape eerily like the early plague years, when AIDS was a gay disease.